Frank Carlson Library

Maverick Falconer is just starting middle school and he wishes he were a hero like his father because maybe then he could deal with his mother's drinking and series of abusive boyfriends, not to mention the kids who bully him in middle school (pretty much the same ones who bullied him in elementary school)--but as the year passes he begins to realize that other kids have problems too, and maybe if they can all survive sixth-grade things will get better....

Hayden Vargas is a girl with a bad reputation who really just wants to finish high school and get away from her alcoholic mother and the whole boring high school dating scene, so when Emmaline Martin offers to pay her for lessons in attracting and managing boys it seems like a way to pick up some easy money for her post-high school life--but she did not count on the attraction she feels for her client's brother, Nolan, who is not only gorgeous, but...

For most of his young life Avery has dealt with his alcoholic mother with the help of his grandfather Pal--he immerses himself in poetry and popular music, and now that high school is over for the summer, he makes out with his best friend Luca (who understands about alcoholic mothers), but the death of his grandfather creates a hole in his life that he can not seem to crawl out of.

When eleven-year-old Ivy Blake leaves the nice farm family where she has been living in upstate New York and moves back in with her mother she is finally forced to face up to the fact that her alcoholic, dysfunctional parent will never be able to provide her with a stable home--and if she wants to achieve her dreams she is going to have to take charge of her own future.

"If there's one person Jacob is never going to be like, it's his alcoholic father. But Jacob is brought face-to-face with his own addictions when his father ends up in the hospital"--Page 4 of cover.

Pretty isn't everything! Trapped by the limitations of her high-school adjective, the realities of her mother's alcohol addiction, and a racially fraught America, Sophie's perspective on what being pretty really means changes drastically in the second adjective-busting novel by the author of Husky, Justin Sayre. Set three months after Husky's conclusion and narrated by Sophie, Davis's best friend, Sayre details the private and public life of someone...